


Broken Bottles Form A Star

by xxx_cat_xxx



Series: Red in my Ledger [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hurt Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, References to Sexual Coercion, Vomiting, but only references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25546237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxx_cat_xxx/pseuds/xxx_cat_xxx
Summary: Clint isn’t sure whether he can fix any of this. He knows for certain that she doesn’t want him to. But whatever mess Natasha is, part of her has become his mess by now.
Relationships: (If you want them to be), Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Series: Red in my Ledger [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1335283
Comments: 16
Kudos: 57





	Broken Bottles Form A Star

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Whumphoarder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whumphoarder/pseuds/whumphoarder) for beta reading!

Natasha is still wearing her rented $3,000 evening gown. In the run-down pub, the shimmering green fabric laced with precious stones makes her stand out like a peacock in a crowd of ravens, but apparently she’s been slumped over the bar long enough that the regular crowd stopped paying attention. Most of them have congregated around a table in the corner, playing cards and taking turns cursing loudly in a language Clint only knows fragments of.

Make-up is smeared all around Nat’s eyes and her head is essentially lolling on her elbows, almost hitting the top of the counter every few seconds before she drags it back up. It can’t have been more than three hours since they separated—Clint in search for the best beef stroganoff that Saint Petersburg has to offer, Nat ostensibly to meet an old friend. He should have never believed her in the first place, given that Nat’s use of that word invariably involves quotation marks, but he has to give it to her that she managed to get hammered very efficiently in the brief period since then.

He plants himself squarely in her field of vision, knowing better than to touch her. “We’re leaving,” he states.

Nat squints hard to force her eyes to focus on him, then opens her mouth as if to object. Instead, her shoulder hitch and she belches a mouthful of alcoholic breath into his face. Clint wrinkles his nose but doesn’t move an inch.

She swallows thickly. “‘S place’s a shithouse,” she announces before slipping down from the barstool without any of her usual grace.

“Exactly.” Clint is secretly glad for her lack of resistance; the last thing he needs after today’s mission is making it into the local news for the bar fight that would certainly start if it looked like he was taking her away against her will. He locates Nat’s coat on the stool next to her and places it over her shoulders. 

“Put that on,” he orders. She doesn’t make any attempt to move, so he does it for her, managing to stuff her arms into the sleeves like he’d do for a child, but doesn’t bother with the buttons.

The bar has fallen silent. All eyes follow Clint as he throws a bunch of bills on the counter, hoping it’s enough for the impressive row of shot glasses lined up next to the assassin, and positions her arm around his shoulders. Nat isn’t heavy; he could have easily picked her up and carried her, but even in the intoxicated state she’s in, he doubts she would have let him.

Instead, he takes on most of her weight as they step out into the freezing night air. His motorbike is parked in the shadows around the corner, out of sight of drunkards who could get silly ideas.

“So, what was this about? Not a fan of ballet, huh?” he jokes while they slowly shuffle through the icy rain, mostly to fill the silence. "Yeah, it's a snooze-fest."

Her face darkens momentarily, just long enough for him to register it as something to remember. She doesn’t reply, but suddenly tries to pull away from him, which only makes both of them slip on the wet snow covering the ground.

“Fuck, Nat,” he swears. “Work with me here.”

Her face is stony. He helps her onto the bike, orders her to keep holding on to him while he speeds up to the limit, mentally preparing himself to catch her in case she passes out during the twenty-minute drive to their motel.

She doesn’t. “Stop. Clint, stop,” she moans instead when they’ve barely covered a third of the way. He’s momentarily happy that she is lucid enough to remember his name, but then he more feels than hears her cough wetly into his shoulder. Swearing under his breath, he stops the bike a second too late. There is already liquidy vomit soaking through the front of her gown.

“Fuck,” she mutters before gagging again.

“It’s alright,” he sighs. “Just get it out of your system.”

Nat doesn’t even bother to get down, just grabs his jacket for balance and bends over the side of the bike as she throws up again. It’s far from the first time Clint’s seen her get wasted; she’s drunk agents twice her size under the table. But it is the first time he’s witnessed her overdoing it to the point where it makes her sick, and that worries him. 

He racks his brain to figure out what is different about this mission, but he comes up empty. If anything, it was easier than the other ones they’ve tackled together in the half a year they’ve known each other, and it definitely involved less violence from both sides. They infiltrated a Tchaikovsky ballet performance to incapacitate a former US illegal arms dealer with poison―not enough to kill him, but enough to make it impossible for him to make a run for it when the police will storm his apartment tonight after their anonymous tip-off.

Clint’s distaste for high culture coupled with the jetlag meant that he dozed through much of the remaining show while Nat seemed to grow more and more tense beside him. He mentally berates himself for not realising something was off before she went on to her personal pub crawl.

But the self-reproach can wait for later―the priority at the moment is to get her somewhere safe and comfortable. “You done?” he asks when the current round of puking seems to be over. Nat hiccups and nods, still panting short, warm clouds of breath into the air. 

“Hold tight.” Clint pulls her back upright and kickstarts the engine. “Give a warning if you need me to stop again.”

She does so when they have almost reached the motel. This time he has to grab her around the waist to keep her from toppling off the bike altogether while the heaves wrack her frame. He’d almost be impressed at the sheer amount of liquor she brings up, if it wasn’t straight-up worrying.

Nat’s swaying dangerously by the time he opens the heavy door to their temporary stay—a shady room and a half with a mouldy bathtub and hidden surveillance cameras outside each window. She steadies herself against the wall to kick off her high heels, then seems to almost fall asleep there until Clint peels her out of her coat and lets her lean against him as they enter the room.

“Let’s get you into bed,” he directs.

She only gags in response.

“Okay, fine. Or barf a little longer first,” he sighs, turning them around 180 degrees to get to the bathroom. It’s another fifteen minutes before she is completely empty. By the time the retching ceases, her eyes are teary from the shear strain of vomiting so much, mascara collecting in a half-circle above her cheekbones and making her look even more like a ghost.

Something about it pulls at the strings inside his chest. He gets up to wet a washcloth, then kneels down next to her. “Hey,” he says almost softly, “You’re gonna be alright.”

“I’m fine,” she replies hoarsely, automatically.

“Yes. Of course.” He wipes the make-up and mess from her face, stroking the hair away from her sweaty forehead. Surprisingly, she lets him, even leans into his palm for a moment and closes her eyes. It’s so unlike Nat to seek comfort like this that he’s momentarily lost for what to do. It’s clear that she wants to stay right where they are, but he can’t let her fall asleep on the bathroom floor in a puke-stained dress.

He swallows. “Nat,” he nudges. Her head rolls to the side and she blinks at him once before her eyes fall shut again. “Nat,” he repeats, “I’m going to take off your dress.” He waits a beat, and gets no response. “Are you listening? I’m gonna help you take off your dress now, okay?”

She gives the slightest approximation of a nod and he hopes that this passes as consent.

Leaning her against the cleanest part of the tiled wall, he ever so carefully peels her out of the expensive fabric. She is wearing plain black underwear beneath it that is luckily unstained. Clint goes to fetch a shirt from her backpack in the bedroom. When he returns, there’s a hazy smile on Nat’s face that doesn’t reach her tired eyes. She looks up at him, and before he realises what is happening, she has clumsily pulled down one of her bra cups, revealing her breast to him.

“What are you doing?” Clint says, taken aback. “Nat, what are you doing.”

She pulls the bra straps down from her shoulders, her fingernails leaving marks on her bare skin on the way down. “Whassit look like,” she slurs, almost aggressively.

“Stop. Stop this, I’m serious.” He takes a step back, his shoulders hitting the door frame.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want to,” she says in a tone that borders desperation.

“I― I don’t know, Nat. But not now. Not like this.”

“You took me home. You helped.” She laughs, until he realises she’s crying now, so quietly that it’s only discernible from the dampness on her cheeks. Her shoulders hitching, she mutters, “‘S nothing personal.” 

And the thing is, he believes her. But he doesn’t know whether that makes the situation better or worse.

“It is for me,” he says quietly.

Whatever is wrongly wired in her brain to make her think that she has to pay for a few scraps of comfort and a drunk ride home with sex, he can’t begin to understand. He wonders whether there has been anyone to ever respect her, her body, the boundaries she seems to be so bad at setting herself. Clint isn’t sure whether he can fix any of this. He knows for certain that she doesn’t want him to. But whatever mess Natasha is, part of her has become his mess by now.

“Nat.” He makes sure he has her attention. “You don’t owe me anything.” He hands her the t-shirt, waits till she has clumsily put it on, then extends his hand to help her up. “Let’s go to bed, okay?”

He doesn’t hold her when she drifts off. There have been times when he’s done that, for the practical reason to keep her warm after the substantial blood loss from a bullet wound while waiting half a day for the med evac, or to ease the shakes from the pneumonia she caught on that one cursed mission in Montana, when she’d been almost delirious with fever. She returned the favour on the flight back from New Zealand where he’d been in solitary confinement for almost a month after an assassination gone wrong—had provided him with the simple, unconditional human contact he’d been craving for weeks. 

But tonight, holding her would feel like taking advantage, even if that’s not how she sees it.

Clint keeps still for half an hour until he’s sure she’s fully out, then gets up again to pee and wash the puke stains out of the dress they have to return before their flight back home. Once he’s done, he sets up his laptop and starts working on the mission report, omitting any details of what happened after the ballet performance. When he finally falls asleep in the early morning hours, he dreams of ballerinas and dying swans.

The next day, Nat is admirably functional. She must have slipped out of the bed without Clint realising because he wakes when he hears her dry heaving in the bathroom. It sounds painful, but when she emerges half an hour later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, she looks almost as impeccable as ever, despite the mother of all hangovers she must be nursing.

“When is our flight?” she asks, nothing about her giving away whether she remembers all the things they didn’t do last night. 

Clint regards her for a long moment. “2:30. I call window seat.”

He knows he should probably address the previous night. He wants to believe that it was a one-time low, but something about the almost routine style with which Nat dry-swallows the aspirin he left her on the table and covers the paleness of her face with foundation makes it impossible to believe that. He doesn’t want to think about what would have happened if someone else had taken her home last night.

He should really talk to her—he knows that. But then, the fragile relationship he’s built with her in the last few months rests firmly on the principle of noninterference. Keeping out of each other’s pasts is how they have successfully navigated their partnership up till now. It isn’t his place to bring up the topic if she doesn’t, he decides―at least not yet. 

Instead, he carefully stuffs the green gown into a plastic bag, makes sure there is a full bottle of painkillers in his hand luggage, and tosses her a pair of sunglasses.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi folks, I hope you're all doing okay in these crazy times! This was my first time writing something exclusively Nat & Clint, so I'd be happy about some feedback/constructive criticism. You can also find me on [tumblr](https://xxx-cat-xxx.tumblr.com/).


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